Commencement Messages: Education Starts, Not Ends, with the Diploma

By Dr. Wright L. Lassiter Jr.

The largest room in any house is the room for improvement. Life is a series of progressions; we graduate from one level to the next, and with each level we experience not an end, but a beginning of the next part of a life or an experience. Whatever life brings it important to remember life is a journeykeep studying and learning.

Commencement Messages offers a collection of addresses delivered to graduating classes at high schools, community colleges, and four-year colleges and universities by the educator, Dr. Wright L. Lassiter Jr. This collection of addresses spans the career of an educator who has served as president of three colleges, and now serves as the chancellor of the seven-college Dallas County Community College District. While all of the materials in his addresses are for the most part his own work, he does not claim total originality in what he has done. He acknowledges his indebtedness too many sources, known and unknown to him.

From the importance of Education and Values to his challenge to Dare to Follow Your Dreams, Dr. Lassiters inspiring messages offer words of wisdom that have opened the door to the future for many graduates over the years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Sep 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9781426995804

Dr. Wright L. Lassiter Jr.

Dr. Wright L. Lassiter, Jr. has over five decades of experience as an educator and administrator in higher education. He serves as college business officer at Tuskegee University; vice president for finance and management at Morgan State University; president of Schenectady County Community College, Bishop College and El Centro College. He serves as chancellor of the seven-college Dallas County Community College District from 2006 to 2014. Upon retirement in 2014 he was named chancellor emeritus. He is a distinguished adjunct professor of leadership studies and ethics at Dallas Baptist University and was named a Master Educator by the University of Texas at Austin. He is widely acclaim guest speaker and leader of professional development seminars and programs. He is the author of eleven books and over a dozen monographs.

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Perspective for Commencement

MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN A CHANGING WORLD

SEIZING THE MOMENT AND THE MANTLE

WORDS TO THE WISE

DARE TO FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS

THE CALL TO SERVICE

WHAT IS LIFE?

A COLLECTION OF EXPRESSSIONS

TAKING OWNERSHIP OF THE OUTCOME

THINGS I WISH I WOULD HAVE KNOWN

THE HURDLES AWAITING THE

THE TOOLS AND QUALITIES OF

YOUR COMMITMENT TO THE

GRADUATION AND LIFE

EDUCATION STARTS, NOT ENDS,

CONCLUDING EXPRESSIONS

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY

Acknowledgments

Each time I am privileged to cause my thoughts and spoken words to be placed in print, grateful appreciation is extended to my wife, Bessie, for her constant support and encouragement. She encourages me during our quiet moments together by saying that others could benefit from the gifts that the Lord has blessed me with.

Through her love and support for fifty-three years, my pen has produced ten published works.

For this book I have been encouraged, assisted and supported to an unusual degree by Toni Barajas. She walked with me through the arduous task of formatting, editing, proof-reading, and the constant back and forth with the publishing team. I am deeply indebted to her for the attention to detail that is required for high-quality published works. This work would not have been produced had she not been there to provide a comforting word during difficult times.

Finally, I acknowledge the support received from Eddie Walker who designed the cover for this book and all of the other published works through the Trafford Publishing Group.

Introduction

My beloved mother introduced me to the magic and mystery of words when she taught me to read at age 3. She told me that I advanced so rapidly that she elected to enroll me in a private school that was operated by a wonderful little lady named Mrs. Chavis. This little school was a large room in her home, but I learned so much under Mrs. Chavis that she remained a dear friend until her departure for heaven many years later.

My fascination with words deepened when my father would bring discarded magazines and books home from residences where he was performing construction work. On one such occasion my father brought home not only magazines and books, but also a discarded 1923 Underwood typewriter. With my now having reading material and a machine, I developed a hunt and peck style and began to not only read, but also write.

Needing an elective in high school, I enrolled in a typing class. I could now transfer my hunt and peck style, into the informed use of more up-to-date typewriters. Being the only male in the class, I had the immediate challenge of not being left behind by my female classmates. To everyone’s surprise, I moved to the head of the class by typing just fewer than 100 words per minute at the end of the first semester.

With my newly acquired skills, and some meager funds, I began casting about for an upgraded typewriter. When my father and I went to the office supply store to purchase a used typewriter, he surprised me by electing to purchase a brand new Smith Corona portable typewriter. Now I had everything that I needed to continue my odyssey with words and the printed page.

As a part of my college curriculum, a course in public speaking was required. My instructor, Mrs. Elihue Barden, had a unique teaching strategy for persons with rapid speech patterns (as I did). That was to cause students to learn to speak with two marbles in our mouths (and avoid swallowing the marbles). Once again, I moved to the head of the class and continued my odyssey with words through a variety of public presentations.

The odyssey with words continued when I participated in two other programs during my life and career at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Those were the Evelyn Wood Speed Reading course, and Toastmasters International. Both programs served as valuable adjuncts and tools in my continuing odyssey—yea love affair—with words and the spoken word.

My career as an educator, public servant, and minister has required me to continually use words. I recall reading a short passage by Reverend Henry Ward Beecher in Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit (1887) that has continually fascinated me: All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

Two contemporary writers also had cogent expressions regarding words. Leo Rosten’s (1972) thoughts are: "Words—they sing, they hurt, they teach, they sanctify. They were man’s first immeasurable feat of magic. They liberated us from ignorance and our barbarous past. For without these marvelous scribbles, which build letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into systems and sciences and creeds, man would be forever confined to the self-isolated prison of the cuttlefish or the chimpanzee. ‘One picture is worth ten thousand words,’ goes the timeworn Chinese maxim. ‘But,’ one writer tartly said, ‘It takes words to say that.’ We live by words: love, truth, God. We fight for words: freedom, country, fame. We die for words: liberty, glory, honor. They bestow the priceless gift of articulacy on our minds and hearts—from ‘Mama’ to ‘infinity.’ And the men who truly shape our destiny, the giants who teach us, inspire us, lead us to deeds of immortality, are those who use words with clarity, grandeur, and passion!"

Garry Willis, Professor of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University, had equally cogent expressions, which impressed me. He writes, "Words are the instruments with which we build our world—our bridges to each other. I cannot see your thoughts directly. You must convey them to me, clumsily or well."

In this limited selection of speeches and presentations I have diligently sought to convey my thoughts through the spoken and written word. My hope is that other readers will find utility in my use of words.

Wright L. Lassiter, Jr.

The Perspective for Commencement

During my long career in higher education I have been privileged to address many graduating classes. These addresses have spanned from high schools to community colleges, four-year colleges and universities. My consistent message is that education starts, and not ends, with the diploma. The second consistent theme is that one must always have goals in life.

The introduction to this collection of messages is a short commencement address on the importance of goals.

Always Have Goals in Your Life

Congratulations on this important achievement in your life! You must view this achievement as one of the most significant achievements in your educational and life journey. File this thought in your consciousness for consistent reference: Education starts, and not ends, with the diploma. You have arrived at this point because you did set a goal in life. This process must continue on a daily basis. When you do that, it enables you to see whether you are on track to achieving them, or whether you need to make some adjustments.

It’s like a navigator of a great ship setting off on an ocean voyage. The navigator will lay out the track on a large chart, showing all the points along the path that the ship is to travel. The track will be frequently updated by navigational fixes, showing where the ship actually is in relation to the desired track. If winds and current have pushed the ship off course, you must steer certain degrees to the right or left in order to get back on course. It’s the same in life, where we have to adjust our actions in order to get back on track and realize our goals.

Goals will add focus to your life. They will create activity and generate the kind of excitement you need to realize your full potential. Goals enable you to build a solid foundation under your dreams.

In setting your goals always think positively about yourself and your ability. If you don’t practice this no can do it for you. Even more important, if you follow this practice you will find that in most cases people will take you as you see yourself. If you see yourself as confident and competent, then that is the way most people are going to see and treat you.

Always strive to be disciplined and always strive for excellence without excuses. Set high goals for yourself, for everything thing starts with you.

Finally, set goals for yourself that are higher than those goals anyone else sets for you. You will never regret it. Remember that in life you must function both as an individual and as members of organizations. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized the value of teamwork. When accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 he said: "Every time I take a flight, I am always mindful of the many people who make a successful journey possible—the known pilots and the unknown ground crew." The Nobel Peace Prize, he said, was being given to one of the pilots, but he was accepting it on behalf of the crew. That is a powerful lesson at commencement!

One of the consistent themes in my commencement addresses is that you must accept a larger share of the responsibility for your lives. There are many things out there that could be labeled as obstacles. Never let them slow you down. Overcome them and never give in.

My development period as an administrator and educator was spent at that venerable institution founded by Booker T. Washington—Tuskegee Institute. At Moton Field in Tuskegee those courageous pilots that came to be known as the Tuskegee Airmen, attained their training by focusing on six points that they took with them through training and then into combat in World War II.

Aim High

Believe in Yourself

Use Your Brain

Be Ready to Go

Never Quit

Expect to Win

There is no royal road in charting your career and life, and there is no easy path to success. Hopefully, if you practice some of the strategies that you will find in this message, you will discern useful tools for your personal tool box.

Congratulations and remember that education starts, not ends, with the diploma. I close with some words from a YMCA chief executive officer that I embrace and I commend them to you:

Watch

Watch your thoughts; they become words.

Watch your words; they become actions.

Watch your actions; they become habits.

Watch your habits; they become character.

Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

PART ONE

COMMENCEMENT & RELATED MESSAGES

The University of North Texas

Denton, Texas

THE HERITAGE OF TRUTH:

EDUCATION AND HUMANE VALUES

It is a great pleasure and privilege to be on the campus of the University of North Texas once again. As the largest comprehensive university in north Texas, this university has developed an honored reputation since it’s founding in 1890. Today this is one of the state’s most dynamic and forward-looking institutions. You have an earned reputation at the regional and national levels in a number of important programs and disciplines.

This convocation represents an occasion when we can visit with subject of values, personal and cultural.

Education and Values

What are values, exactly? In the abstract, values are the internal feelings we have about what are good, bad, indifferent—useful or superfluous, beautiful or unattractive. In general, values are held by individuals, but on the basis of principles common to a group. Your family, your community, your country, culture or civilization. Values are the social codes that regulate our lives.

In colleges and universities, as well as in education generally, values are an issue of virtually constant concern. On the one hand there are those who claim that values are subjective, individual, and irrelevant to the business of conveying factual knowledge. From this vantage, values have no place in education. In the first place, to attempt to teach or study them infringes on the rights of those who hold particular sets of values, as well as on the rights of those who reject them.

In the second place, subjective values can bias or prejudice the outcome of scholarly inquiry and research, which are supposed to be value-free.

Now on the other hand there are those who believe that it is impossible to exclude values from education, and far from being excluded, they should be required. Some representatives of this school of thought even go so far as to claim that higher education should stand or fall according to its capacity for dealing with values. As Charles Muscatine writes in The Future of University Education as an Idea: Either the university of the future will take hold of the connections between knowledge and human values, or it will sink quietly into the noncommittal moral stupor of the rest of the knowledge industry.

I suppose there may well be an intermediate position, in this instance based on the question of priorities. As a character in a Brecht play might put it—First grub—then values.

Democracy and Public Education

Well, as I have said, these are not new issues. I should like to suggest, however, that they have become far more critical with the advent of democratic society, with its dependence on public higher education for mass audiences.

The reason for this is simple. When education was something restricted largely to a ruling elite, it had to deal only with the consensual values of a relatively small, culturally, homogenous group. Students were very largely male, young, white, sound of body, affluent, and already well schooled—not only academically, but in the social graces as well. Thus in universities such as Cambridge in the late 1800s, for example, it was very easy to know what values an education should include. They were the clear-cut, traditionally defined values of an English gentleman.

But if we look back from across the Atlantic, we find that, even in the late 1800s, the constituency for American higher education had already grown much more diverse. The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 had expanded both the audience and the goals of United States colleges and universities. Students were no longer just members of the well-to-do upper crust, pursuing degrees that would prepare them for careers in the professions and life in polite society. They were also the sons and daughters of farmers, merchants, laborers, artisans, and others. They were the burgeoning middle and working classes of the new nation.

They were studying for a far greater range of reasons, and pursuing a far greater range of goals. Not least, I should add, they subscribed to a far greater range of values, and those values played important roles in their educational careers. They were concerned not with participation in a traditional elite society, but rather with building a new, broad-based, and ever changing society. They honored not the inherited virtues of being well born, but the earned virtues of energy, hard work, and accomplishment. They believed, in sum, in the eminently radical, eminently practical ideals of democracy and egalitarianism and the right to make a new way.

Following the Morrill Act’s historic opening up of higher education, the constituency of United States colleges and universities experienced an ongoing diversification that has extended down to the present. The GI Bill, the development of junior and community colleges, equal opportunity and affirmative action, open-door and full-opportunity programs; all of these brought into the student population not only large numbers of students, but vastly different kinds of students. As pluralistic as were their backgrounds, so to were their values and value systems.

Because of the American commitment to an educated citizenry, this pluralism